Google has been served with a search warrant by a Minnesota judge which requires the firm to hand over personally identifiable information on anyone who has searched for a particular name.

The warrant, published by public records researcher Tony Webster, requires Google to provide a wealth of information on any internet user who was found to have searched for one of four variations of a fraud victim’s name.

Why could not this judge, with equal logic, just issue a general warrant for the police to be able to go door to door at all locations in the suspect town and search the browser histories of all devices found therein? (yes, I realize it's less efficient than just serving an order on Google, and that people can erase or disable their search history).

Wouldn't this amount to more-or-less the same thing as the Google order? Yet people would be enraged if this were done.

How do the police know the 'perp' didn't do this search on tor? Or thru an overseas proxy site? Or on openvpn with SSL or something? (not sure if all of this is technically correct)

This order is clearly nothing more than a fishing expedition lacking either legality or reasonable justification, and is an abuse of the court discretion.

Google has been served with a search warrant by a Minnesota judge which requires the firm to hand over personally identifiable information on anyone who has searched for a particular name.

Google, and other search engines, are required by law to not store such information beyond a few days. Politicians don't want their searches to be discoverable. It would be impossible for Google to comply with this warrant if it is complying with the law and more than a few days passed.

The real answer to fraud is secure banking. Right now banking is so fucked up so that the rich can do illegal things like tax evasion, that it leaves open many doors for fraud. Eliminate the security wholes in banking and no one will be able to commit wire fraud.

This is disconcerting but it should not be a shock. If you have seen the movies about actual special operations such as Captain Phillips, Zero Dark Thirty, or even the fictional Enemy of the State, you know what the powers that be are capable of knowing anything (and doing anything). Is it legal? Is it constitutional? We can debate it all we want, but does that matter when the people don't have the means to defend themselves against the Deep State? It would seem that not even the President can stop them.

Exactly. Is there really anything resembling anonymity anymore? If someone wants to know you, they can probably put together enough information from "secure" servers to tell you things about yourself that you don't even know (or at least remember).

But then they can simply demand logs from the commercial proxy service.

Who is they? I bounce servers each time I connect, at least once a day. Sometimes more since some sites, especially google, banks, travel agencies, and oddly enough craigsliist are fussy about connecting to a known proxy. I have to bounce servers, usually only once but sometimes more, till I get one that doesn't offend them. I frequently use one of the offshore servers anyway. Be an awful lot of work for someone to get the logs from hundreds of servers many offshore, especially when the logs don't show content anyway.

Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card.

It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:

use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship;
all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;
leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you ask it explicitly;
use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging.

With the CIA leak seeming to state they have a backdoor into every major system out there, something like Tails is pretty much the minimum. Even then I've heard there are zero day exploits built into firmware...